Senior Backend Engineer , Portfolio Experience
Builds and evolves scalable backend capabilities for GitLab’s portfolio planning and work items platform, partnering with product and users while mentoring engineers. Requires senior full-stack experience with a backend focus, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL performance optimization, API design, and automated testing.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Collaborate with product managers and engineers to shape requirements, understand user needs, and break complex projects into shippable iterations.
- Design and implement backend and real-time features in the GitLab monolith, including GraphQL and RESTful APIs and subscriptions, with a focus on performance, reliability, and user impact.
- Build and evolve portfolio planning capabilities, including work item hierarchy, status rollup, and capacity planning.
- Improve PostgreSQL performance at scale through query and write optimization, indexing, denormalization, partitioning, and moving suitable workloads to Elasticsearch or ClickHouse.
- Create proofs of concept, maintain extensive automated test coverage, and support safe rollouts with feature flags and strong observability.
- Mentor engineers and open source contributors through code reviews, pairing, feedback, hiring, career development, contributor issues, and hackathons.
- Participate in on-call rotations, troubleshoot production issues, contribute to root cause analysis, and improve development and review processes.
Requirements
- Experience representing the user perspective while working through trade-offs with product managers, engineers, and users.
- Experience leading projects involving several engineers over multiple months.
- Full-stack experience with a current backend focus.
- Proficiency with Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
- Understanding of complex modern frontend architectures.
- Strong PostgreSQL skills and experience improving database performance at scale through query and write optimization, indexing, denormalization, and partitioning.
- Experience designing and evolving GraphQL and/or RESTful APIs with attention to scalability, backward compatibility, and clear frontend contracts.
- Experience improving large automated test suites, including test performance and reliability.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills for an asynchronous, distributed environment.
- Experience integrating artificial intelligence into development workflows.
Nice to have
- Experience building artificial intelligence-powered features.
- Experience with Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, or Python.
Compensation and benefits
- United States base salary range: $139,200–$235,200 USD.
- Benefits include flexible paid time off, team member resource groups, equity compensation and an employee stock purchase plan, a growth and development fund, and parental leave.
Skills
Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Postgres, GraphQL, REST APIs, Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, Python, Artificial Intelligence, Automated Testing, Feature Flags, Observability, Gitlab Monolith, Database Partitioning
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